Anyone who has heard Sheila Nevins introduce her hand picked documentarians at an HBO preview, knows: she is much of the show. Formidable and funny, even when she intros heart-wrenching work like Cries from Syria with a plea to stop the killing of children in that country, her lively personality blazes forth. Now she’s written a book, You Don’t Look Your Age . . . and Other Fairy Tales, a memoir in short pieces of how she got to where she is, head of documentaries at HBO for decades, all while keeping it real. A tell-all, her book is not shy to un-P.C. revelations, like her views on sleeping with the boss, and plastic surgery, her dicey relation with her mom who had a rare disease, Raynaud’s phenomenon (a lack of circulation in your extremities), and balancing a demanding job with the challenges of raising a son with Tourette’s. Add to that, for a celebrity packed audio book, she just called a few of her nearest and dearest.

Rosie O’Donnell, Marlo Thomas, Lily Tomlin, Glenn Close, Alan Alda, Edie Falco, Liz Smith, Bob Balaban, and Diane von Furstenberg, read from stories she’s selected for them. Judith Light reads “Facing Facelifts,” Lena Dunham “From Cosmo to Ms.,” Gloria Steinem “Eunice’s Period,” RuPaul “Picture Perfect, Almost,” and Meryl Streep “The Wrong Kind of Hot.” This story was a turning point for Nevins, beginning with a moment at Chock Full o’ Nuts, and ending with the explanation for why she champions stories about those “who need visibility, notoriety, and acceptance.”

Nevins’ lack of pretense will hit you right away, as her striking looks do when you meet her: large mane streaked a la Susan Sontag—“My hair is my best feature,” she writes, pondering the effect of chemo while waiting for a mammogram. Her smarts are not intellectual, as Sontag’s were, but street, more like Rosie’s. Good friends, they are both into using wisdom garnered from experience to help others, as when Nevins coaxed Rosie to make a doc of her heart attack monologue offering women a mantra for detection. As Nevins has done in making the HBO documentary list as essential as it is, her You Don’t Look Your Age, in paper and audio may get you through the ravages of life on our planet.

Regina Weinreich

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